Monthly Archives: July 2015

That which seems to be wealth may in verity be only the gilded index of far-reaching ruin.
~ John Ruskin [1]p.187

Everybody seems to know that the concentration of income and wealth among “the one percent” has accelerated in recent years. Actually, the most extreme concentration is in the top one percent of the top one percent of the population. We all agree that beyond some undefined point that is not a good thing. Conservatives don’t want to talk about it. Liberals will decry the situation but don’t want to talk about the conservative’s bugaboo: “re-distribution of wealth.” That’s a bit of a contradiction, of course, since the recent extreme concentration of income and wealth is exactly that: a massive redistribution of income and wealth from the whole economy to the top 0.1% of the population – the wealthiest of the wealthy.

Democracy Derailed
A funny thing happened on the way to democracy. The “American Experiment” got de-railed by the formation of power elites and their reinforcement since before C. Wright Mills first wrote about them in 1959.[2] Mills was a true maverick sociologist. American sociology had been busy finding its place as an academic profession among the more established fields of economics, political science, and psychology. In the 1940s and ‘50s, sociologists were trying to distance themselves from the European sociologists and their socialist leanings. That was the era of the “Red Scare,” Joe McCarthy, and the height of American anti-communist witch-hunts after the Korean War. Mills was an accomplished researcher with all the right academic credentials, but his iconoclasm forced him out of Columbia University. His work exposing the workings of class, status, and especially power under industrial capitalism is as relevant today as is President Eisenhower’s warning of the “military-industrial complex” in his farewell address to the nation. The power of financial, corporate, and military elites has grown much greater since Mills’ work.

The political ideology of the power elite is simple: the corporate and financial elites are presented as the source of innovation, technology, jobs, and economic growth – they are “the job creators.” Therefore, its members should be left to do their good works for society with no regulation and no taxation on their wealth creation. For, the riches they create will certainly “trickle down” to the masses and everyone will live happily ever after. Somehow, the distorted invocation of Adam Smith’s metaphor of the “invisible hand” – whereby the self-interested behavior of all the economic actors will mysteriously result in the public interest being optimized – is supposed to fit into that image of elite noblesse oblige.

Fortunately, that mythological form of elite ideology is beginning to conflict with the understandings of the public. That is one of the main reasons for the initial popularity of maverick outsider candidate for the Democratic Party nomination for President for 2016. Bernie Sanders unashamedly speaks directly to the failure of the ideology of the economic elite and the blatant injustices that now dominate the economy. He proposes programs to compensate for the failures of the endless-growth economy to include the general population in the economy. He would even break up the “too big to fail” banks that caused the financial crisis of 2008, directly challenging the financial elite on Wall Street.

But why does this concentration of wealth and income seem to be inevitable if unconstrained by populist politics? Will it be enough to just develop programs such as those of Roosevelt’s “New Deal” during the Great Depression, to rebalance the economy?

Positive Feedback
One thing is generally missed when extreme income inequality and concentration of wealth are topics of conversation. Quite simply, the concentration of income and wealth is a positive feedback loop. In other words, they feed upon each other; each reinforces the growth of the other. I would even go so far as to say that this is a universal principle of power accumulation in any money economy that has no counter-force. Money is power and that power is usually exercised politically. High income and extreme wealth make the accumulation of more wealth easier because of the access it gives to economic and political resources. Great wealth provides great opportunities to influence politics; the exercise of that undue political influence results in decisions by politicians – legislation – that affords the wealthy more income and thus more wealth. It’s a positive feedback loop.

Most Americans do not make enough income to accumulate even a modest amount of savings, no less anything that could be called wealth. The very few, on the other hand, through very large incomes – including salaries in the millions, obscene self-gifted bonuses, stock options, dividends, and capital gains – are able to accumulate large fortunes. That can happen only by the creation of growing poverty.

Phantom Wealth Causes Poverty
John Ruskin, the nineteenth century British art historian, articulated this problem very well when he wrote on political economy. Ruskin argued that the creation of wealth inevitably produces poverty whenever wages are unjust.[1] Ruskin’s analysis of just and unjust wages was the basis for his critique of the political economy of his day for its obtuse claim to be simply “the science of getting rich.” I cannot imagine a more relevant consideration in examining the wildly distorted wage disparities created and accepted in today’s corporate state under the same crass ideology. Elites accumulate ever more millions in salary and bonuses, as well as capital gains through stock market manipulation, etc. The real wages of workers are ever lower as better-paying jobs are outsourced to destitute workers in poor nations. The greater the concentration of wealth, the broader is the spread of poverty.

The accumulation of vast wealth provides many political opportunities to influence the economy through the political system of lobbying, graft, and corruption. Tax laws have been significantly changed since the 1950s more and more to favor the rich and powerful. Yet the clamor of the political elite for “lower taxes” and deregulation of corporate activities – including the direct economic influence over elections – continues unabated. Political elites reinforce extreme income and wealth concentration by legislative pandering to economic elites. The two tend to merge.

Pushed to the Breaking Point
The American people have been victims of the ideology of the economic elites for decades. But just as with mass incarceration, unrestrained police shootings, and other political aberrations, the middle class did not lose its values over the last few decades, become lazy and thereby fall into poverty. The power of the wealthy has gotten so great that the inevitable distortions to what might have been a just or a moral economy, have intensified. People have been forced out of the middle class and have become poor because the rich have increasingly become super-rich. We are reaching a breaking point. All money economies rely on the circulation of money to sustain their operations in support of human life. The extreme disparities in income and wealth are pushing our economy to collapse as the super-rich abandon life for money.

Fortunately, more and more people are recognizing the absurd extent of income and wealth concentration and are looking for a new model for the political economy. But we need clarity to change our vision of a new life-sustaining economy.[3] We would all do well to read John Ruskin and C. Wright Mills today. They are more relevant than ever.
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[1] John Ruskin, “The Roots of Honor,” and “The Veins of Wealth,” pp. 167-203 in Unto This Last and Other Essays.(1862) London and New York: Penguin Classics, 1985, 1997.
[2] C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite. New York: Grove Press, 1959.
[3] David C. Korten, Change the Story, Change the Future: A Living Economy for a Living Earth (Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler, 2015) goes a long way in seeking that clarity.

The “homeless” person is part of what is perceived by the power elite as an unneeded collection of persons of no value to the system – a “surplus population.” I first ran across the concept of “surplus population” in a sociology journal article many years ago. The point was simple: a certain number of “positions” exist in society at any particular time and the number of people in society is often larger than the number of persons. The residual, or surplus population, consists of those who have no position.

It is now abundantly clear that all the production of goods and services – even including the superfluous, trivial, and just stupid products – can be accomplished using fewer and fewer workers than in the past. Overflowing suburban garages and commercial storage units demonstrate the oversupply of often meaningless products. Waste abounds. At the same time, the shrinking middle class tells the story of job shortages and a growing “surplus population.”

As the Industrial Age advanced, more and more goods could be produced per unit of labor; increased labor efficiency resulted from the application of technology to the production process. In the 1950s and 1960s, many people feared automation because it eliminated the need for many jobs. At the same time, we were told that new technologies would lead to shorter working hours, labor-saving home appliances, and more leisure time for everyone. From the 1960s on, women entered the workforce. But the expanding economy kept most workers employed.

Producing Waste and Wasting Lives

Because the economy was expanding so much, the need for workers expanded too, for awhile. Even the computer revolution absorbed more of the workforce as it expanded. Yet, many “middle-management” jobs were eliminated by the power of spreadsheets, word processors, and database management systems. The information economy expanded, but eliminated many jobs in the process. Through the 1980s and 1990s, as information control was enhanced, well-paid manufacturing jobs were lost as labor was “outsourced” to destitute low-wage workers in Asia and Latin America. Capital is mobile, labor is not. This trend was strengthened by a stream of international trade agreements like NAFTA and the TPP, which have increased corporate power over national economic policy. Many manufacturing jobs in the U.S. were lost. The remaining jobs were mostly retail and menial service jobs with marginal wages. Well, we all know how well that has worked out. The “American Dream” became a nightmare.

So, as the middle class contracted, Americans are left with less and less employment offering a living wage. Large numbers of people can no longer participate in the labor market while others live at or below subsistence level on minimum-wage incomes or less. Neither rents nor food are cheaper. Prices continue to rise as wages decline.

This is all well and good for the power elites who run the system, at least in the short run. More profits mean more power. For the growing numbers left out, the system seeks to either abandon them or find new ways to exploit them. They are to be 1) imprisoned for profit; 2) shot in the back by police; or 3) run out of town by any means necessary. City ordinances are commonly passed these days to make being homeless illegal! As usual, the victims are blamed.

But dark economic storm clouds are stirring on the horizon. As long as the money markets are run by the plutocrats and oligarchs for their own further enrichment, the real economy deteriorates. The economy is not run democratically for the benefit of everyone being able to make a living. The Congress represents the plutocrats, not the public. So, whoever is pushed out of the economy will be treated in these ways. The race to irreversible climate chaos continues as does the illusion that it is something about an abstract future.

The only alternative to this existential contradiction is a moral and ecological economy. And that requires locally organized movements for resistance and replacement of the mega-banks, international corporations and their political allies. These institutions have no national allegiance; they have no human allegiance. They must be overcome, not by force of arms (impossible) but by turning away and replacing corporate rule with community institutions. Otherwise, collapse.

The New Capitalism and Its Death

Unfortunately, Corporate Capitalism is the capitalism we have, and it is not about to relinquish its institutionalized greed. It is not the American Capitalism that built this industrial nation; it is a predatory capitalism that is extractive in nature and is destroying the nation. It does not merely extract the remaining resources of the planet. It also extracts monetary value from the economy to the point where instability is inevitable.

While still in control, the financial elites will never allow a hybrid economic model such as the Europeans have partially achieved, that would balance their greed with the public interest. That would not allow the obscene profits and power that it now enjoys. So, various forms of resistance are needed in concert with local ways to simply replace the “financial services” that the mega-banks fail to provide communities in their quest for phantom wealth generated from within the mega-banking system itself.

Local control can build community institutions and economies that can employ their populations instead of relegating them to ghettos and prisons. A genuine response to climate disruption would, of course, generate massive new employment. That will only be possible when we let go of our Wells Fargo, Citi Bank, and Bank of America accounts [of all kinds] and replace them with locally controlled banks with community ownership and ecologically sound policies. The new global movement of local resistance to predatory extractive capital can also direct community resources to employment in building resilience in a rapidly changing environment.

Homeless Plutocrats

Fact is, weird politics aside, overpopulation is a huge globally problematic factor in trying to curtail climate disruption as well as unemployment, underemployment, and homelessness. There will be nowhere to go for all those Bangladeshis when the seas rise a few feet and wipe out much of their farmland and homes. India is already building defenses against possible climate-forced migration. Similar scenarios are unfolding around the globe.

But the main source of the impending planetary climate crisis is the plutocracy driving global economic growth; that process also excludes more and more people from participation. Of course, it is the U.S. and other industrial nations that consume vast quantities of resources and produce vastly more CO2 per capita than the populations of “developing” nations. A key way to get population to level off and for masses not to starve is for the education and empowerment of women all over the planet to be accelerated. But none of it will much matter unless the plutocrats are driven from their comfy corporate homes and the economy is turned from extractive to ecological. There will be no place for plutocrats in a new “living earth” economy.

Meanwhile, corrupt corporate capital continues to exploit “surplus populations” in the U.S. and around the world. The “carrying capacity” of the planet has been outrun by endlessly growing numbers of people clamoring to participate in the phantom wealth of the industrial nations. Only consumption constraint of the wealthy nations can begin to bring the impact of their populations in line with the carrying capacity of the land they occupy. An unwinding of the ongoing re-distribution of ever more wealth to the very rich can allow a re-balancing between population and environment to begin. Some plutocrats may become homeless in the process.

Without major climate-chaos mitigation humanity will be depopulated alright — by resource wars, including water and food wars, mass starvation, and unprecedented social chaos. Homelessness could become the new normal. Hard, mostly political-economic, decisions lay ahead.

Borrowing money is a tricky thing to talk about, even trickier than talking about money itself. We all seem to have a love-hate relationship with the stuff. Well, maybe ‘stuff’ is not the right word. People disagree about what money actually is. Some, who I’ll call “money realists,” believe that the essence of money is that it is a physical thing that has intrinsic value. For the money realist, only a fixed commodity – usually gold – is “real” money. So called “fiat money,” valued because a government declares it as “legal tender,” is not seen as “real.” Some others, the “money representationalists,” believe that money is an object that has value because it represents something else that is valued, also usually gold. That is what the “gold standard” was about, but money also represents the value of anything we value. Borrowing is a major reason money is so troubling.

Money represents the value of a credit or debt, enabling the exchange of anything of measurable value (in monetary units of quantity) for that thing. Finally, for most people money is an abstract symbol of value based on some metric or quantity that measures the value of anything. That is why money can be transferred, borrowed, and lent electronically – it is a symbol, whether represented in paper or binary code, of a measurable value. Despite that abstraction, we usually treat money as a real object to be exchanged for other real objects, or for real services, or even for promises to provide such things later. Most money today is “fiat” money, because it is declared by a sovereign government to have a relatively stable measurable value for any exchange. But what is value? Is value real or do we just imagine it so?

You can read Wikipedia’s entries on money to get an overview of the conventional definitions of money, currency, credit, and debt. But something is missing. What is increasingly important today is how money is being transformed. Critics complain that the government is “printing too much money.” However, most money today is brought into being by electronically “posting” it to a computerized accounting system in a bank. An electronic bookkeeping entry creates money as a debt to a bank, not as printed currency.

Borrowing Nothing

A bank that is a member of the Federal Reserve, lends money into existence electronically when a customer borrows it. That’s right; it didn’t exist before it was lent, but it creates debt for the borrower and an “asset” (credit) for the lending bank in the form of a note or bond. The note or bond held by the bank obligates the borrower to pay back the amount borrowed plus interest. That means that more money is always owed (to the banks) than is ever borrowed, which is a peculiar problem in itself with deep implications for the entire economy. Think Greece; same basic deal.

The Federal Reserve oversees this process, called the fractional reserve banking system. “Fractional reserve” means that the bank gets to loan out a certain percentage more than it holds “in reserve” as deposits. This whole process must be carefully regulated or things can get way out of hand. Just before the financial crisis of 2008, banks were allowed to loan many more multiples of their reserves than ever. Leverage always entails risk.

Banks may lend some of the money they create to mortgage lenders and “payday” lenders, as well as to corporations and individuals. Mortgage lenders – savings and loan institutions, regional banks, etc. – will borrow from the national bank, make a home loan, and then sell the mortgage to another bank. Without vigilant regulation of the conditions of loans, things can get quite messy. If enough bad loans are written and if enough loans default, the whole system becomes unstable. This is especially true when loans are bundled into “derivatives” and sold to unsuspecting investors looking for a steady income stream.

Making Phantom Money

The gradual deregulation of banking and finance, starting with Bill Clinton, Alan Greenspan, and Larry Summers, has released the most powerful financial elites from societal controls. The 2008 financial crisis resulted from several factors, including the lowering of reserve requirements for the Big Banks. Mortgage brokers and other primary retail lenders loosened the lending requirements for borrowers. Regulators looked the other way. The resulting risky mortgages were then purchase and packaging into “derivative” financial instruments by the Big Banks on Wall Street. They were then resold to pension funds and other institutional investors, putting many people at risk. Lots of money was “made” in the form of fees and profits. In the process the entire world economy was endangered. After all, the banking system of the U.S. and other major industrial nations had already been integrated and these financial manipulations had spread world-wide.

The advent of high-speed electronic data processing and communications has allowed the creation of new forms of financial manipulation of the money system. High-speed computers can skim “value” from stock markets by engaging in electronic “trading” so fast that tiny differences in bid-ask pricing can be exploited in the interim between offers by ordinary traders. So-called “derivatives,” financial instruments comprised of abstracted fragments of mortgages or other debts, can be marketed to the point of risking collapse of markets. The largest financial institutions have transformed money from a public medium of economic exchange into a method of economic plunder and political control of society. But these financial absurdities only exist because of the greatest absurdity of all. We are all forced to borrow nothing from nowhere and it is costing (almost) everyone dearly.

Phantom Federal Debt: Who Needs It?

It has been generally taken for granted that “fiat” money is issued by sovereign governments for the benefit of their national economies. Not exactly. Most currencies are valued on the basis of the solvency of the government, its international balance of payments, and the stability of its economy. International exchange rates are based on such factors. But since the early 20th century, for the most part such assumptions have been a fiction. In the U.S., despite the Constitution, which authorizes the Congress “To coin money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin,” the government does not create money. Yes, it still stamps out pennies and quarters, but the private banks, which own the Federal reserve, create most money. In 1910, the major private banking interests conspired at their infamous meeting on Jekyll Island to control the national monetary system. In 1913, Congress passed the Federal Reserve Act, empowering the cartel of private investment banks to control the money and banking system and “loan” money created out of nothing and from nowhere to the U.S. Treasure. Hence, the national debt. What a windfall for the banks – and a permanent indebtedness for the nation – unless we reassert our national sovereignty.

It has worked out much better – for the mega-banks – having the government borrow money from the private banking cartel called The Fed so that the banks can control everything and the rest of us can take on all the resulting debt! If our government were actually sovereign (instead of subservient to the mega-banks), it could ISSUE money rather than borrow fake money from corrupt banks. What a different economy that would produce.

The Industrial Era has provided prosperity for many in the nations that industrialized first. In many ways it has also involved the plunder and pollution of both Body and Planet for over 200 years. After beginning to improve material existence for industrialized nations, especially through the 1950s and 1960s, the broadening participation in prosperity began to fade. The widely praised success of the industrialized nations of the North was achieved on the backs and at the expense of the non-industrialized peoples of the South.

Colonialism and later imperialism were essentially a massive transfer of materials for industrial production just as slavery was a forced transfer of human labor for agricultural production. The result was prosperity in Europe and North America and poverty nearly everywhere else. At first, environmental degradation was mostly in the South except in Northern factory towns; now it is everywhere. The culmination of the Industrial Era is climate disruption and its converging catastrophes of social disintegration, poverty, starvation, and war – unless drastic actions are taken now.

The Worst of the Best
But prosperity had its costs for the people in the industrial North. It has increasingly distorted human life by marketing more and more meaningless products while wages decline and jobs are lost. Capital is mobile; labor is not. NFTA, TPP, and other international trade agreements betray citizens and national sovereignty in favor of unfettered international capital movement. The worst of prosperity for the growing numbers who are excluded is that the poverty and pollution caused by extractive industry and international trade fall disproportionately on them. The worst of pollution is that the politics of extractive industrial technology have allowed increasingly toxic materials invade living systems everywhere.

Any real democracy would have put on controls to protect the public interest. Our false democracy serves the corporate interest in immediate profit at the expense of the public interest in health and happiness. Exposure of the smallest microorganisms and the largest ecological earth systems to the myriad of chemicals in the waste of prosperity wreaks havoc on living systems. The diverse and ubiquitous forms of industrial and consumer waste never existed over millennia as living systems evolved. So they never had a chance to develop resistance to the toxic effects of unnatural waste. Biological evolution occurs at a pace vastly slower than the speed with which the industrial revolution has polluted the planet. Today’s unprecedented rate of species extinction is accelerating with no end in sight.[1] Humanity depends on the complex web of life for its survival. But our power elites are locked into a death dance of short-term and very short-sighted self-enrichment. [2]

Larger earth systems, mainly climate and the oceans, are key determinants of the stability and survival of species in local ecologies. In addition to widespread exposure to toxins, climate disruption has also caused major damage to local ecosystems as well as larger earth systems. The damage is seen in key components of these systems, such as acidification of the oceans and increasingly erratic storm patterns. These large earth systems play major complex roles in local ecological conditions over time, and have major impact on their stability. What recently appeared to some as a hiatus in global warming, measured as average atmospheric temperatures, was actually an artifact of the oceans absorbing much more carbon dioxide and heat than had been expected. This has caused unprecedented acidification of ocean waters, massively disrupting the food chain by causing many species of crustaceans to be unable to form their shells. Coral reefs are dying; clam and other populations are plummeting. Changes in ocean temperatures are having major effects on weather patterns such as El Nino and La Nina, which in turn cause more extreme weather in various locations.

Prisoners of Greed
The extreme danger of doing nothing or doing a little about global warming is increasingly obvious to most thinking humans who have access to basic climate-change information. But one factor in policy decisions that is rarely mentioned is the relative comparison of risk and reward for different lines of climate action and for different political interests. Power elites are ‘in the game’ but play out their personal (high salaries and obscene bonuses) and corporate (stock prices) short-term interests, without reference to the public interest or the interests of humanity.

“The Prisoners Dilemma,” is an exercise used by game theorists and behavioral researchers to better understand how human decisions are made in conditions of variable risks and imperfect information. It is a simple game. Each player has two choices. If player A chooses the potentially high-reward option, s/he can win all, but only if Player B chooses the moderate reward option. If both players choose the potentially high-reward option, both lose. However, if both players choose the moderate reward option, both players win moderate rewards. Ultimately, it is about greed and aggression vs. cooperation and moderation. In such simulations, the players usually learn over several iterations of the game that the moderate-reward win-win scenario works best for all. But learning takes time.

In the real world where situations are much more complex, the risks and rewards can vary widely. But despite claims of free-market fundamentalists, cooperation often performs far better for all involved than does greed. Our economy of ever-growing extractive capital and industrial and consumer waste has in recent years performed very well for those power elites who have chosen the potential high-reward option of greed. (The rest of us seem to have chosen the moderate reward option, and we are losing.) But just as in the Prisoners Dilemma, the continuation of the plunder capital model of success is ultimately unsustainable. Because these “corporate robots” are captives of the magical thinking of the Sacred Money and Markets” ideology, they are slow learners when it comes to cooperation and protecting the commons.

Games are abstract forms; they can be repeated endlessly by simply starting over regardless of the outcome. But the real world is not a game; it has real boundaries of time and environment. When we destroy earth systems, there is no do-over. Extinctions are forever. We cannot restart destroyed ecosystems; we can only try to save them before it is entirely too late. We cannot rewind the growth economy, nor can it go on much longer. All we can do is create a new economy that does not destroy the earth systems upon which we depend for survival. The old failing growth economy will die of its own failures or we will transform it into a living economy that supports both humans and the rest of life on this planet. We must choose quickly.

Choosing Life
Ever more concentrated wealth in the hands of the power elites ultimately will destroy their dominance. It is an open question whether their downfall will come at the hands of climate catastrophe or social rebellion, or both. The timing and success of cooperation overcoming greed will determine the degree of chaos avoided. We also wonder whether the necessary Great Transformation of the economy and society can happen before climate disruption leads to increased food insecurity, poverty, mass migration, water wars, and related catastrophes.[3] We must say yes, turn away from the international corporate growth economy, and shape resilient local community economies in harmony with the living Earth. No small task.

Life, of course, is much more complicated than the “Prisoners Dilemma” game. Yet, games can help us learn more about human behavior and decision making. Other social psychological patterns are also informative, such as the “free rider syndrome.” I liken the Wall Street financial elite, the President, and the Congress to a gang of subway riders who jump over the turnstile to get free rides at everyone else’s expense – only the consequences of their ‘free ride’ are far worse. They take vastly more and cost the rest of us vastly more, both on an immensely grander scale: that of the global economy. They destroy the system in order to continue plundering it.

These elite players routinely take the high-risk option in seeking the high reward – but they have already rigged the game. They ‘socialize’ the high risk (pass off the losses to the rest of society). They ‘privatize’ the high rewards (capture for themselves the phantom wealth generated by their financial and economic manipulations). They do all this through personal and corporate control of “the game” – but they don’t seem to understand that it is not a game; it is a life and death struggle for humanity. Just a few of their methods include:

• legislating tax reductions for the rich;
• preventing climate action, which would cut into their pollution-producing profits;
• eliminating legal controls on financial speculation, cutting government programs that are in the public’s and planet’s interest;
• keeping wars of choice going for huge arms industry and banking profits;
• reducing government control over international financial transactions, trade, and money laundering; and
• forcing through Congress international trade deals – such as NAFTA and TPP – that legalize corporate sovereignty over governments, preventing health, labor, and environmental regulations that might interfere with their profits.

In the short run, that high risk is borne by everyone else and the high rewards are theirs. We have to understand, many of the most powerful are clever sociopaths; that is how they got where they are. Others are merely highly paid skilled functionaries, supporting the system that rewards them and punishes deviance from corporate “values.” They can retire to their high-security estates and revel in their clever success, though many are unable to quit their quest for ever more power. But their greed is ultimately self-destructive in spite of their denial and their political power. They may even survive a little longer in their gated compounds than some less privileged. But nobody will escape a dying planet. We may all lose everything if their gamble fails, and it will. It is only the rest of us who can make a difference, if we will.[4]

The most important question is whether we will be able to do something about the coming collapse in time to avoid it. That is why to do anything less than take extreme actions to constrain climate chaos is suicidal. That is also why our situation is so difficult. To wait for the President, the Congress, or the financial and corporate elites to take drastic actions to transform the growth-at-any-cost economy to a sustainable living economy is both futile and suicidal too. Only by massive social mobilization can the power elites be brought under control and the economy transformed to align with the requirements of living on the Earth. Perhaps Pope Francis’ encyclical and his invitation to Naomi Klein to the Vatican conference on climate change portend a major shift toward the Sacred Life and Living Earth story. Yes, there are signs everywhere that the Great Transformation has begun. But we must hasten it.
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[1] Gerardo Ceballos, Paul R. Ehrlich, Anthony D. Barnosky, Andrés García, and Todd M. Palmer, “Accelerated modern human-induced species losses: Entering the sixth mass extinction,” Science Advances. Vol. 1 no. 5 (19 June 2015). http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/1/5/e1400253.full
[2] David Korten, Change the Story, Change the Future: A Living Economy for a Living Earth (Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler, 2015) makes an important point: Because of the predominance of the culture of “Sacred Money and Markets” the power elites are not so much in control of the corporations (“money seeking robots”) that rule the economy. Rather, they are mere cogs in the leviathan of corporate plunder of the Earth’s living wealth. Control rests with the Story, which, as he argues, must be changed.
[3] Christian Parenti, Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence (New York: Nation Books, 2011) takes us on a tour of numerous locations around the world where the “catastrophic convergence of poverty, violence, and climate disruption” is already fueling migrations, wars, and starvation amidst the devolution of failed states and collapsing economies unable to sustain growing populations whose “carbon footprints” are vastly smaller than those of the industrialized nations that have caused most of anthropomorphic global warming.
[4] Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014) chronicles both extractive capitalism’s disruption of the climate and the political failure of mainstream environmental organizations to institute effective climate action policy. Klein concludes that only a mass movement from below that transforms the social order can save the planet. David Korten (2015) offers a transformative framework for replacing the “Sacred Money and Markets” narrative that dominates the planet today, with a “Sacred Life and Living Earth” narrative capable of producing and sustaining a moral economy in the interests of humanity and the planet.